Empty As A Pocket With Nothing To Lose

I am, for the first time, ever, blogging drunk.

It is strange and liberating.

I have finished work, and have been a full time singer/songwriter for two days, and it feels really quite nice.

I don't know what to write, other than that I feel quite nice. Because of the beer, arguably, but also perhaps because I am finally starting to put into action all the plans that I have ever secretly hatched whilst being at work. Getting up after it gets light is another big bonus.

I need to get into the swing of blogging at home, but for now I must content myself with the fact that I can post anything.

Like pictures of myself, taken drunkenly in kebab shop toilets.

Unemployment rocks.

Thursday Before Friday

I swan around the place. There is blonde Latvian sitting at my desk doing my work, so I focus my energies on attempting to distract other people from theirs.

My super-hot-replacement is, indeed, super-hot. She is all tall and blonde, and has thrown the delivery men into quite a fluster. She is very nice, and has lots of good stories about what it is like to be a model. My modelling experience is limited to once having the best photo up on a Wall Of Shame at some University friends' house. People would walk into the room, gaze at the wall of about one hundred of the least flattering photos of people ever taken, and just stare at the one of me, justifiably aghast. From what I gather, professional modelling is all about standing out from the crowd, so I think I might give it a shot.

I still have no idea what I am going to do with the minutae of my days when I leave, but every time I try to think about it my brain just shrugs it off. Sing, probably. At people, aggressively.

I might, MIGHT take photos of my leaving do, and post one of the SHR (super-hot-replacement), but then I might not. Some people have been a bit too grabby about the whole affair and I do not reward bad behaviour (I have seen Super Nanny and that programme about making naughty dogs stop being naughty.)

Tomorrow is my last day. Holy fuck.

Covert Blogging

This post, hastily written, is brought to you by the feeling of being slightly displaced (but in a good way), and also of the feeling of being the fat and ugly one (not so much in a good way).

I am still allowed to come to the office Christmas party.

Next week I am going to go and have a look at the taxidermist shop on the Essex Road. Not with a view to making a purchase, although there is a life-size lion that I think would brighten up any hallway.

Also I am going to 'do lunch' with people.

Also I will wake up after it gets light.

Also wear fancy shoes.

(I could wear fancy shoes at work, but I am going to walk around London in fancy shoes. During the day. Because I can. Who goes to shops full of dead animals wearing party shoes? Me.)

I have so many songs to write, to finish and to record.

There are three and a half days left.

Nine AM No More.

Seven more days of work and suddenly I am gripped around the neck with the realisation that soon I won't have a schedule to adhere to. I won't have hours to keep. Nobody is going to bollock me for being late for something every single morning despite my best efforts to squeeze onto the Northern Line with ten thousand million other commuters on time.

What, I keep thinking to myself, the fuck am I going to do? There will be nine o'clocks and six o'clocks that won't mean anything to me any more. I won't be going through a door religiously at ten minutes after one of them and ten minutes before the other. Phones will ring and I won't be obliged to answer them. I am not sure I am going to cope very well with the lack of routine. Perhaps I will create one for myself, although all I can think of at the moment is:

9 am - Don't go to work
6 pm - Don't leave work

I'm drawing a bit of a blank on the rest of the details.

There is the album and the tour, and I will have to sort out gigs. There are songs to be written. Lunches to be talked over and plans to be made and elaborated upon. There are all these things, but these things don't answer the big questions. Questions like what the hell time am I supposed to get up in the morning? Am I allowed to watch Charmed during the day if there is nothing else to do? Can I still eat biscuits? What about Pret Super Club sandwiches?

These are all things I shall have to figure out on my own.

Tom and I are going to a Halloween party on the 28th November and last night we concentrated very hard and tried to think of costumes. The first suggestion was that we go dressed as two fish (in a tank) and go as 'Léonie's jokes'. Horrifying, apparently. I swiftly put a veto on this one as I chuckled to myself. "How the hell do you drive this thing?" is sheer comedy genius, and I will not be deterred from this just because jealous people are jealous of my ability to remember jokes and tell them at inappropriate times.

We decided eventually, and I'm not sure whether maybe this wasn't a secret, to go as each other's worst fears about ourselves. I am going as a Boring Lawyer and Tom is going as a Sell-Out X-Factor-Style Pop Star. I am going to fake tan him, which I suspect just might be the highlight of my whole life. I would appreciate costume suggestions and reassurances that my jokes are indeed really, really ace.

(Another of my favourites: A man walks into a doctors surgery and says "Doctor, I can't pronounce my 'f's or my 'th's!" and the doctor says "Well, you can't say fairer than that then.")

(Come on, it's brilliant.)

Watch, As A Human Brain Digests Itself!

I can't write anything. I'm too frustrated.

I have eight more days of work until I am free.

My brain is seeping out of my ears out of frustration. It tastes really bad but I can't stop licking it off my cheeks. For other things I can't stop doing please see: writing things that are really, really disgusting.

Later on I am going to go and meet a jazz pianist who is looking for a singer to do corporate gigs with. I am meeting him at a gig at which I will sing some songs. Auditioning in front of a live audience! Excellent. It will be very good for the 'not starving' element of my leaving work plan if I can do lots of paid corporate gigs. Also, as much as I want to sing my own stuff, I do so love singing jazz standards.

It's Tuesday. Of my penultimate week of work.

I'm going fucking crazy.

With The Oils And Perfumes And The Incense

From my desk where I sit I can see a lop-sided rectangle of sky. It is a big window and quite light and airy, and I have become oddly fond of this little piece of sky. When I have been sitting here in winter I have looked at the patch and watched it become steeped in darkness, gazing on the first moments of the imminent night. In the summer it is bright from when I first sit down until I stand to leave.

It is strange to think that, soon, this piece of sky will belong to someone else. I shall not miss it, but I shall nevertheless recall it fondly. Such a lot has happened in the time that has passed while I have been sitting here. I imagine some film sequence in which I sit still and the seasons circle me like a fairground ride, light and dark merging into one another. Things have changed while I have been dreaming myself out of the window.

Today the rectangle is blue. Clean, azure blue. It is my favourite sort of day. The sky is rich and blue, the wind is sharp and the air is tinged with the anticipation of winter. The sort of day that calls for sunglasses and a scarf.

I am going to Eastbourne later on. Working tonight and tomorrow morning so that I can come back tomorrow afternoon in time to get ready for a night out. It is Sam's party in Hoxton for his birthday, and then very close by three other friends are jointly celebrating their birthdays. I plan to get back home tomorrow afternoon and get ready in a leisurely manner. Have a luxurious bath with stuff in it (I will deem the bath a success if I manage not to drop my book in the water), moisturise myself into heady, hydrated bliss, dry my hair carefully and take ages over my make up. The effect produced, of course, will look exactly as it would if I'd taken ten minutes, but I will feel a million times better. I decided what I was going to wear on Saturday three days ago, because the idea of taking ages to get ready and then putting on a carefully-pre-selected outfit is utterly delicious. I will maybe pour myself a glass of wine to have while I'm pampering myself. I am going to have new shoes, as well. The are satin peeptoe heels, colour raspberry. How extraordinarily decadent. I saw them and I fell in love with them, I even bought some matching lipstick in anticipation of owning them.

The flat that Bec, David and I have inhabited since January has been let. On the fifteenth of November we will have left. My room, with the bright pink curtains and view of the train track ten metres away will belong to someone else. The mice will torture other people.

Soon the two constants of work and flat will no longer be my constants. I have split these things and shared them around strangers who I have never met. I am moving on. I cannot really imagine what it will be like not to come to this place everyday and not to return to that place at the end of it. I know I am doing positive things, and I feel very happy about it, but so many changes are being crammed in to one period of time.

I think this is why I feel such a very strong urge to take some time for myself on Saturday afternoon. I want to relax, to get used to things as they move, and to remind myself that, although things around me are changing, I am not. I will always be someone who regularly drops books in the bath, and who loves moisturiser to the point of distraction. I know that a pair of special shoes will always make me feel special, whether I am a singer or a receptionist.

For now I am watching the clouds scud softly across the corner of my rectangle and committing it to memory. I think that perhaps I will miss it slightly. I know that there will be other pieces of sky I will find, perhaps bluer and wider with fewer clouds and more possiblities, but I also know that I will always hold a place in my heart for this one.

It Doesn't Matter If It's Good, It Only Matters If It Rocks

I went to bed early last night, diligently. I felt so smug as I carefully cleansed, toned and moisturised before reading for a while then switching off the tall lamp next to my bed. I had taken a bath and relaxed, knowing that after that there was nothing left to do but go to bed and sleep. Tonight, tomorrow night, the night after that and the night after that one and I think the night after that I am booked up, and I decided to rest in preparation. Off I went to sleep, dreaming elegantly of pretty flowers, adorable kittens with bows around their necks and strawberry-flavoured lipglosses that repell hair even in the whippiest of winds.

I woke up this morning absolutely bloody knackered. My head was pounding and my eyes felt like someone dastardly had snuck through the window in the night with some superglue-laced mascara and performed some kind of avant-garde makeover. To add to the simply marvellous fun, the builders next door had decided that this moment was absolutely ideal for banging hard on the wall just above my head with what I can only assume was some kind of fucking industrial-sized hammer. "Right" I thought through gritted eyelids, "I am going to write a letter. Of complaint. Perhaps in capital letters. That'll bloody learn'em."
I'm sure they could have found other things to do on the building site at five-to-fucking-seven in the morning. Maybe building some shelves quietly, attaching a door handle or having some Silent Reading Time with their still-crisp copies of The Sun. Maybe things that invole quiet implements like screwdrivers rather than loud ones like hammers. Then I giggled childishly at the thought of the relative merits of a quiet screwing and a loud nailing for a while until I got up.

To sum up, though, the 'going to bed at a reasonable hour' tactic clearly doesn't work for me. Apparently the only sleep that works for me is sleep in the mornings, which is just about exactly the time I am not allowed to stretch out under my duvet, where my consciousness can ebb away gently and I can feel myself being lifted by the Hugh Jackman-esque arms of sleep. Instead I am forced to get up and squeeze onto the Northern Line to be sweated on by ten thousand advertising executives before sitting in an office all day, dreaming and avoiding work.

Soon I will escape. I will run, free and penniless, with the other artists, sitting in cafés and writing meaningful poetry about Life. Well, the chances are that I won't be running, but I shall certainly adopt a satisfied (if tortured) swagger.

For now I must endure, and accept that really my body is used to late nights. It likes them, even if it makes me tetchy and difficult to be around. This is lucky, because secretly I was bored last night, amid all that relaxation. I wanted to be partying, to be talking animatedly with someone about how much corporate life sucks and how much I like their hair. I wanted to be debating the judiciousness of accepting another glass of wine and then screwing judiciousness and accepting two. Going to bed early is overrated and, if I am to judge by the way I feel today, not at all good for you.

Nope. Tonight I shall continue the experiment and go out and get resonated, and see whether tomorrow I feel more chirpy. All in the name of science, you see. I am quite the modern day Marie Curie.

Don't Know What It's About, But It's Good To Go: UPDATED

I had a very productive weekend. On Friday I successfully burnt Tom on the thumb with some lasagne, which is not easy and requires a very specific temperature and spooning method.

On Saturday I went to Eastbourne to do some more recording. Tom drove us both down. It was a beautiful day, the perfect weather for going the wrong way on the A27 for a few miles and arriving a bit (read: three hours) late. We got there at about six and then Isaac and I worked until about midnight while Tom highlighted stuff for his course. Then we went to bed on the floor, slept horribly and started recording again the next morning. We got loads done and there should be another song up on the MySpace this week. It has bits of my scratchy cello playing on it as well, so I am hoping no classical musicians listen to it ever.

Last night we went to a gig in Shoreditch, which was very trendy and cool. There was a guy called Bass Clef (or at least that's the name of the act, I'm sure his real name is something reassuringly normal) who played the trombone. He was standing on stage complete with copious facial hair and a very warm-looking suit, playing the trombone at the same time as mixing on some decks and adding various other sound effects. When I say "adding various other sound effects" I don't mean it euphemistically as if to imply that he was farting along or anything, I mean that he actually was adding sound effects. Like whistles. Also he waved a flag every so often, which I assumed must have been arty in some way and therefore made perfect sense. After him was the guy I knew, who is called Rod and was very good. Unfortunately after about an hour and a half tiredness frogmarched Tom and I out of the door. It was great, though, I saw some people I hadn't seen since University, including one guy who was on my course and another who my housemates and I used to nickname "Fit Philosophy Guy", collating all the information we had on him in one name: he was fit and studied Philosophy. After seeing him again last night I remain convinced that he's gay.

You may or may not remember that last week I was handed a bit of paper with some man's name and number on it when I was in the pub. This, you would think, is quite an unusual occurence. Well. Seemingly it is all the rage in London at the moment.

Yesterday afternoon I got the number 345 bus back from Clapham Junction to Clapham North. The bus was packed and I finally found a seat upstairs. It was warm and cloying, and I was just willing the journey to pass, particularly because I'd had about three hours of disturbed sleep the night before and had a pounding headache. The bus slammed to a halt at a bus stop and some people began to file past me to the stairs. As they did I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and there was a man looming over me, clutching a scrap of pink paper. "Here" he said. "Take this." I did, murmuring thank you for no discernable reason. He hurried off the bus. I looked at the lady next to me and opened the folded paper.

"u are very attractive"

Oh, bloody hell. What is going on?

"my no is 07748******"

Alright, great.

"i'm south african"

Good to know.

"my name is gumaro"

Well, thanks Gumaro. That's flattering and nice to receive a compliment. Could you see into my soul? See that I am a kind, decent person who forms meaningful relationships and treats those she loves with care and respect? Somehow did you understand that I am a sensitive, warmhearted individual with hopes and dreams? Could you, Gumaro, see all of those things?

"i luv your BOOBS"

Ah. Perhaps not, then.

I am hoping this trend continues, because I would very much enjoy creating a collage of all the scrappy bits of paper I get given in the months and years to come. My friend said she thought it was because I look approachable, which I took to mean 'easy', but I don't think I do. Yesterday I was sporting a high necked top and a jacket, and I had a pounding headache which can't have been making me look particularly friendly.

I was planning on having a gentle week this week, but already it has packed itself out without me knowing. I've just agreed to meet a friend tonight, Wednesday is a friend's thirtieth birthday, Thursday perhaps a gig with Bec and then Friday I go to Eastbourne to get more recording done. I am simply far too busy for notes from crazy men with breast fetishes. At some point I am supposed to be finishing some more songs off to take down this weekend.

Luckily I have just bought some new lipstick, which helps me to focus and makes me a better person, not to mention far more alluring to foreigners on buses, which I think we can all agree is the main thing.

I am going to go and think up tricks to play on an idiot foolish enough to give person with feminist leanings a note about her breasts with his number on it.

UPDATED: The next song - 'Writing In Pencil' is up on the My "Good Lord Aren't I Down With The Kids" Space.

Sometimes You've Got To Say "Hey..."

I have nothing to write, so I am doing a meme thing.

A is for age: 24

B is for Beer: Yes, please.

C is for Career: Singer/songwriter. It's actually true. How odd.

D is for Your Dog’s Name: My parents' dog is called Paddie.

E is for Essential Item You Use Everyday: Moisturiser. Oh I love moisturiser.

F is for Favorite T.V. Show: Oh God, I love Charmed. It's so gloriously trashy. I hate reality TV, it makes me want to die. Die and be completely dead.

G is for Favorite Game: I am spectacularly terrible at card games, namely because I forget them as soon as I have learned them. I don't really like board games, although the one time I played Risk I won out of sheer fluke and pissed off the people I was playing with so much that they didn't talk to me for an hour afterwards. Ah, good times. I am quite good, however, at Dingbats.

H is for Hometown: Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

I is for Instruments You Play: Cello. I am teaching myself the air guitar, and it is going quite well.

J is for Favorite Juice: Grapefruit. No, orange. No, wait, them both mixed together.

K is for Who You’d Like To Kick: I wouldn't mind kicking Paris Hilton. Also Tom Cruise.

L is for the Last Place You Ate: I am currently eating an apple. So 'all over my keyboard' is probably the most accurate answer to this.

M is for Marriage: Yeah, maybe. Someday.

N is for Your Name: Léonie. Sometimes Higgsy, Hig15 (as in one-five) (I have no idea why) or The Short Fat One Who Isn't Miss Universe.

O is for Overnight Hospital Stays: Nope.

P is for People You Were With Today: Lots of people. At work.

Q is for Quote: "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
Douglas Adams

R is for Biggest Regret: Oh, shit, I don't know.

S is for Sport: I am very, very talented at all sports. I just seem to take to them like a duck to keyhole surgery.

T is for Time You Woke Up Today: 7.30 a.m. Then 7.45 am. Then again at 8.15 am. I was late for work.

U is for Current Underwear: I cannot possibly divulge what underwear I am wearing. Oh, alright then. Knee length floral bloomers.

V is for Vegetable You Love: I am a big fan of the courgette.

W is for Worst Habit: I drink too much coffee. I don't rest enough. I swear quite a lot. More than a lady should.

X is for X-rays You Have Had: One or two, I think.

Y is for Yummy Food You Ate Today: A biscuit from M&S, meaning it was fancy and expensive but tasted exactly the same as the ones from the newsagents up the road.

Z is for Zodiac: Taurus. This means I am stubborn, loyal, and exceptional in bed. I should think.

I think we have all learned a lot from that. I have learned that filling out memes is boring but passes the time, and you have learned that reading my meme-posts is boring and you'd rather pass your time with your head in a cow.

Last night was ace. I am, of course, really horribly bad at table football, and it says a lot that I had a good time despite being forced to do something I am rubbish at. Tom is very good at it, because he played lots at University. I was, of course, bitter about this and desperately wanted to say that yeah, well, you clearly had too much time on your hands while everyone else was out getting drunk on red wine, talking about Nietzsche and having ill-advised sex on coats at parties, but then I remembered that I spent most of my time standing on stage singing earnestly to bemused audiences whilst dressed in ill-fitting costumes, so I couldn't. Tom was the best out of all of us, and soon everyone wanted to be on his team. I was torn between being ashamed of myself for letting loads of goals in and being pleased with myself for having brought in a compensatory good player into the group.

I had a good time, I think we all did. Also my friends informed me that, in fact, the Miss World competition is for the hotties, and the Miss Universe competition is for the body builders. I am so hoping that I have to train up a body builder. I will not be able to resist challenging her to an arm wrestle, which will no doubt result in six broken wrists and a severe case of croup.

This weekend I am back off down to Eastbourne for more singing, hopefully to get my next song on the MySpace. I am coming back on Sunday for a gig that a guy I know from Uni is doing. Tonight I am going to rest, probably go home back to Clapham for the first time since Monday (Tom's house is nearer to work) and let my housemates know that I still exist and check that they haven't turned my room into the tap-dancing room. I am feeling quite exhausted, which is of course my own fault, and to compensate for it I am wearing red lipstick for no discernable reason.

I would encourage you to, please, have an astonishingly good weekend, and to keep the song that the title of this post is ripped from in your head throughout the duration.

Come Fly With Me, Fly!

I have just been told that the person who is replacing me at work is a former Miss Universe entrant and I have to sit next to her for some days to teach her the job.

Be prepared for some serious crises in confidence that week. Apparently she is very nice and intelligent, and luckily I am the sort of person who does not judge herself on the relative merits of the person standing next to her. Even if that person does happen to be a fucking supermodel.

I will be attempting to buoy myself with things like "once I told a really good joke" and "I am quite good at drawing horses", but all in all I will need to be told I am pretty once or twice that week.

This morning I nearly got run over twice. Once was my fault, the other was not and so I was justified in my exclamation of "what the fuck?" and a brief eye-rolling exchange with a bus driver. I sort of enjoyed the eye-rolling. Like one of us had tutted and said "bloody cyclists!" and the other had replied "oh I know, they think they own the bloody roads" and we'd both shaken our heads in mutual disgust and taken a sip of our pints.

I walked past a group of schoolgirls this morning (shortly before the attempted murder by the cyclist) and one of them said "oh, that girl smelled nice!". I'm not sure whether she would say that, although I had sprayed myself liberally with my Eau De Merde Du Chien (Dior) just moments before. It is nice to have effort appreciated.

Tonight is the table football night, and I will be spinning away like crazy. I know it's cheating, but it doesn't actually benefit me to spin, I just enjoy it, so I don't see how it can really be bad. Naughty, perhaps, but not sinful.

I just told Tom that my replacement was going to be a supermodel/Miss Universe and he said "I hadn't really decided to replace you but, oh, alright then." Then I drew him a small horse and he quickly remembered his priorities. He knows which side his bread is buttered. (I'm not sure which side that is, hopefully the upper side, but as long as he knows it's probably alright.)

I must go and sulk for a little while, and wait for people to get in touch with me and tell me that, while I am no Miss Universe, I could safely be nominated for Miss Making A Fuss Out Of Nothing (2006) and be certain to get in the top three.

I'll Order It From Zanzibar

I need to do something. Type something and occupy myself, if only to stop myself annoying Tom by sending him meaningless one word texts and then calling him for no reason. He is trying to sleep, which, I suspect, is partially why I am being so annoying. I am bitter, you see. About not being allowed to sleep during the day, even though I am seeing double from tiredness. I am tired so nobody else should be allowed to sleep. Despite the seamless logic of this I shouldn't annoy Tom so much because if I do he'll stop being my girlfriend and I'll have nobody to talk with about ponies, lipgloss and boobs.

I met up with some friends last night in a pub called the Marquis of Granby near Goodge Street station. I was (wait for a thrillingly surprising revelation) pretty tired (I know, shocker) but absolutely wanted to go anyway. I had three glasses (large) of wine (red) without eating anything (stupid) and ended up weaving my way though near-empty streets back to Oxford Street station talking meaningfully with my friend. Before I left the pub a man came up to me and handed me a bit of paper with his name, email address and phone number on it. I hadn't talked to any boys all evening so I don't really understand why he would do that. I concluded that he couldn't possibly be English. I went back to Tom's and taunted him with the bit of paper until he confiscated it and ripped it up. I can't even remember the name on it. I want to say Gillian, but that seems unlikely.

This morning was somewhat torturous, but it was made better by the following things:

- I had a really ace time last night (despite the seeming presence of Other Boys)
- I was at Tom's house, from which it is only one stop to get to work
- I listened to Mr Scruff, Keep It Unreal, which is ace
- It is an absolutely beautifully sunny autumn day
- I went to put on my pointy hurty boots and then realised my trainers were there because I left them the other day, so I slipped them on with no small amount of glee and am feeling very comfortable.

The trainers thing is really perking up my day. Also I am listening to my beautiful little sister's album (see links) and it is lovely. It is "franco-britannique electro-hop", which is my absolute favourite kind of hop. She is very good, and her music is kind of calming and eerie at the same time, which is delivering me into a state of trance-like stillness. Thank you, little Sophie sister.

Tomorrow night I am being forced to go out again. The people I went to Biarritz with have set up a thing called Fun Time Thursday (FTT), which means that every other Thursday it is someone's turn to organise something fun for us all to do. There is usually gin involved, but it is not mandatory. This Thursday it is my turn to do the organisationalisation (it is a new word) (do you like it?) and I have decided that we are going to a place called Bar Kick in Shoreditch, which is very near where I work. Shoreditch is a bit cool and trendy, lots of asymmetrical haircuts and fashionably peculiar clothes that only really look good on very thin people, and this bar is no exception. It has lots and lots of table football tables, of which I've hired out two, for competitions. There will be ten of us maximum, and I think it'll be fun. Of course, I am ultra-terrible at table football, going in more for the 'wildly spinning the bar things' technique than one that involves any real skill. I am organising stuff to showcase my uselessness! Hurray! Next time I will put together a Maths-a-Thon and we can all watch as I don't know my times tables.

Sophie's album has finished now so I have started it again.

Ike just called me about working with someone who sounds uber-cool. I might need to go out and buy some fashionably peculiar clothes. Also diet myself to stick-like skinniness, although I don't really want to do that. My breasts are sometimes my only bargaining tool. The argument "but...boobs?" never fails, and if I lose that I will have nothing left. Let's all eat cake. Or whatever you want. What's your favourite dish?

I'm not going to cook it...

(Do you get it? Look at the title. Now do you get it? Yes, you do.)

Something in my post was in some way relevant to my title. I don't believe this has actually happened before, because if it had all my posts would have to be titled "I Am Tired And Whinge A Lot".

Misunderstanding, Didn't Understand.

I am so tired because:

I haven't slept enough ever, ever in my whole life.

My ideal day today would involve a large sofa, some cushions, tasty things to eat, various DVDs and some episodes of Charmed. I haven't watched an episode of Charmed for a long while, and I would like to very much as I feel my intellect has diminshed through lack of staring at Alyssa Milano's glorious rack.

I had a fantastic, if exhausting, weekend in Eastbourne. We recorded two songs, one of which we'd started before and the other I wrote on Saturday. I added some cellostration (not, I hasten to add, a real word) to one of them, and we made good headway into the second. Getting up super-early (for a weekend) and staying on a sofa under a sleeping bag is not conducive to the most relaxing couple of days in the world, but it is all worth it. We discussed the tour in the spring (thirty-two dates, in the UK, funded by the Arts Council) and showcases and all sorts of things, which are exciting and overwhelming and seem completely incongruous to my weekday life of hating the phone and watching the clock.

Last night Tom and I went to my parents' house with my elder sister and her boyfriend, and we had a lovely time. We listened extensively to my little sister's album and had discussions about the songs. We ate lovely food and drank some lovely wine, and then got up this morning far too early and fell asleep on the train.

I feel slightly hurt today. I have found myself in a situation where I feel a bit left out of something, to put it in an irritatingly non-specific way. I found out that something was going on that I haven't been invited to. Some girls are meeting up and they haven't invited me. I'm not hugely surprised, I'm very different from these people and I've never been particularly convinced that we get on very well, but still, I feel left out, which isn't the nicest way to feel. Friendships are so difficult to navigate, and I get the feeling with at least one of these people that, although they are perfectly nice to me to my face, they don't actually like me very much. The feeling of being subtly put-down and smiled at simultaneously is horrible, and add to that feeling left out and deliberately excluded.

Perhaps I'm just tired, perhaps just paranoid because I haven't slept very well in the last couple of weeks and am exhausted to the core. Or perhaps they don't really like me and I should cut my losses and think about all those people who really are my friends. The shame lies in the fact that I do actually like some of the people properly and they still leave me out of things, like maybe I haven't passed some test that one must take to be a proper girly girl and get pissed on Chardonnay. Maybe I am too serious, or too poor, or too arrogant.

Who knows. Blur's Song 2 is on the radio, it's nearly lunchtime, I get to go home in some hours. I have a black and white silk scarf around my neck and it's someone's birthday today so there'll be cake later. All I can do is be myself and be good to people, and if for some reason they don't like that there is nothing I can, or should, do to ingratiate myself. I just don't like it.

I am so misunderstood. Perhaps they're all jealous because I have a blog that is read by like, tens of people. Perhaps they envy my amazing capacity for complaining about being tired. Perhaps they covet my ability to feel paranoid and sensitive about things that are probably nothing. It could be any number of things, when I think about it.

I shall go and drink tea and mull it over.